It is generally agreed upon that creativity is an important property of human language. For example, speakers routinely coin new words, employ novel metaphors, and play with words through puns. Indeed, such creative processes take place at all levels of language from the lexicon, to syntax, semantics, and discourse. Creativity allows speakers to express themselves with their own individual style. It provides new ways of looking at the world, by describing something through the use of unusual comparisons for effect, emphasis, or interest, and thus making language more engaging and fun. Listeners are typically able to understand creative language without any difficulties. On the other hand, generating and recognizing creative language presents a tremendous challenge for natural language processing (NLP) systems.

The recognition of instances of linguistic creativity, and the computation of their meaning, constitute one of the most challenging problems for a variety of NLP tasks, such as machine translation, text summarization, information retrieval, dialog systems, and sentiment analysis. Moreover, models of linguistic creativity are necessary for systems capable of generating story narratives, jokes, or poetry. Nevertheless, despite the importance of linguistic creativity in many NLP tasks, it still remains unclear how to model, simulate, or evaluate linguistic creativity. Furthermore, research on topics related to linguistic creativity has not received a great deal of attention at major computational linguistics conferences in recent years.

CALC-09 was the first venue to present research on a wide range of topics related to linguistic creativity including computational models of metaphor, generation of creative texts, and measuring morphological and constructional productivity. CALC-10 provides a venue for publication of further research on these topics, and other aspects and modalities of linguistic creativity. Within the scope of the workshop, the event is intended to be interdisciplinary. Besides contributions from an NLP perspective, we also welcome the participation of researchers who deal with linguistic creativity from perspectives other than NLP, such as cognitive science, psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, the arts, and human-computer interaction.

Topics

We are particularly interested in work on the automatic detection, classification, understanding, or generation of:

neologisms;

creative use of figurative language, including metaphor, metonymy, personification, and idioms;

new or unconventional syntactic constructions (e.g., May I serve who's next?);

Invited speaker

Engineering Linguistic Creativity: Bird Flight and Jet Planes

The achievement of flight by man is often used as an example of how
engineering practice may lead to the succesful emulation of behaviours
observed in nature. It is also used to illustrate the idea that a succesful
engineering solution (such as a jet plane) need not always mirror faithfully
the natural phenomenon which inspired it (the flight of birds).

The task of engineering solutions for linguistic creativity is at present
made difficult by an incomplete understanding of how we manage language and
how we achieve creativity. Nevertheless, over the past few years a large
research effort has been devoted to exploring issues such as computational
creativity, automated story telling, or poetry generation. In these cases,
there is also a combination of a naturally occurring source phenomenon and a
set of engineering techniques that provide an emulation of it.

In this talk I will review a number of such research and development efforts
that I have been involved in or studied in detail, paying particular
atention to identifying which traits of human activity are being modelled in
each case. Assuming these to be the equivalents of bird flight in terms of
linguistic creativity, I will go on to explore to what extent this analogy
is a valid one, what the differences are between the two cases, and what the
analogy might have to say about artificial linguistic creativity if it were
valid.

Location

The CALC-10 workshop will be held in conjunction with NAACL HLT 2010 in Los Angeles, on June 5, 2010.

Paul Cook and Suzanne Stevenson (2010). Automatically identifying the source words of lexical blends in English. To appear in Computational Linguistics. An article on automatically inferring the words that are combined to form expressions such as brunch and fantabulous.